22Sep

You’ve Created Your Content – Now Be Social with It!

Posted in Social media

Previously on Online Friendly, we told you about some ways to update your website frequently. These days, visitors to your website can do more than just look at your pages.  Social Networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are a powerful another way to have your website content put right where many people spend at least some of their day.

Not only can you share your website content on the profiles you have on these social networks, but your visitors can also share your content with their network of people.

In this blog post, we will show you how to make things easier for your visitors to share your site with their network of friends and business colleagues.

  1. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn Buttons

    Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook have a share button that you can put on your site. These buttons are lines of code that you can copy and paste into your site template.Each time your visitors click on them, they will be able to share that part of your site with the people they know.

    The LinkedIn widget is embedded as part of a link instead of looking like a button. With all three, once a visitor clicks on the link or button, they will see a window with a link back to your site, some descriptive text, and a place they can add their own comments.

    Here you can find the official buttons from the three of the major social networks:

    - Twitter: http://twitter.com/goodies/tweetbutton
    - Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/share/
    - LinkedIn: http://developer.linkedin.com/docs/DOC-1075

    For example, the blog we built for Toronto Wedding Invitation and Graphic Design company Laura K Design has two buttons: a Twitter share button and a Facebook ‘Like’ button. The ‘Like’ button from Facebook let those visitors who click it to both put the blog post on their Facebook ‘wall’ and permanently under their profile Likes – both visible to all their friends.

    For more popular Sharing Buttons, see SharingButtons.org

  2. Sharing Services

    Instead of adding individual buttons for various social networks, you can have as ingle button which includes today’s most popular social networks.

    Not only that; most of these social media button sallow a visitor to share your content via other avenues such as email or phone text message.  Some services also have statistics to give you an idea how many people are sharing your content and how.

    Two of the most popular sharing button services are:

    - Add This
    - Share This

    With both of these services, you can create and customize your button with the social networks and sharing services where you want your blog posts to be published on.

    You can also choose the button based on the kind of website you have and platform used, for example, WordPressor Blogger.

  3. Social Widgets for WordPress

    Finally, if you have a WordPress blog (our favourite blogging platform), these two plugins will setup a sharing button quickly and easily. They can be installed and customized from the WordPress admin panel. Some of them allow users to publish simultaneously the content on all social networks in just one click.

    - Share This
    - Add To Any
    - Only Wire for WordPress

    There are plenty of share button widgets for WordPress. Here is a list with some of them: http://pelfusion.com/tools/top-35-plugins-of-wordpress-to-share-your-blog-post/

    Remember, these days many of your visitors are social and will be willing to spread your content around the internet, attracting new visitors to your online identity – if you make it easy for them!

    Feel free to contact us at our Toronto office if you would like to know more about how to go social with your web site.

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07Sep

4 (+1) Ways to Regularly Update Your Website

Posted in Website Content, Website Marketing

This week we want to tell you more about updating your website. In our previous posts, we explained why you should keep your website updated. We also listed some ways to discover interesting and useful content for your site.

After you have your content, the next step is being able to update your site with it. Here are four ways to keep things up-to-date:

  1. Put your blog RSS feed on your homepage
    If you have an existing blog, you can have your web developer add the Google AJAX Feed API to your site so all new posts will automatically show up on your homepage with links to the blog. We use the Google API to automatically add our posts in this blog to our corporate website.
  2. Add your Twitter feed to your website
    Use Twitter and the Twitter feed widget to post short news items to your website. This is how we update our corporate news at http://www.kobayashi.ca/news.html.
  3. Use a Flickr widget for images
    If you have images, consider including the Flickr widget on your site so all visitors can see the latest images you have added to your Flickr galleries.
  4. Hire a web company
    The most straight-forward way to update your site is to have a web development company available for low-cost maintenance updates. However, Brent, President at Kobayashi Technology, warns about the different kinds of companies you can choose between. “Make sure you find one that is geared towards maintenance, because not all are – intentionally or not, some companies focus on the big projects, with the little updates put at the bottom of the list for ’when they have time‘”. You may even want to look for a web development company that offers copywriting and content services. They not only upload the new content to your site, but also interview you and your staff, and search the web to find interesting content and make it attractive for your visitors using images and videos.

+1: Content Management Systems

Can I do it all myself? This is one of the most common questions clients ask us. Brent explains how Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress have changed the concept and difficulty of ‘web updates’. “CMSs allow anyone with basic computer skills to update some or all of a website”, he comments. “About an hour of training will be enough to start you easily keeping your website up-to-date”.

Most popular CMSs – like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal – have friendly interfaces that make the process of updating your website easy for you. They usually include a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to make HTML easy, and a media manager which helps you upload images and videos so you can insert them into your updates and make your content more attractive for visitors.

One thing to keep in mind

If your updates do not fit a pre-defined template, or have many elements such as pictures and video, you may still want to hire a professional to do the update, or at least tweak an update you have made.

This will help keep your website always looks its best, and doing the most it can to support your business.

Feel free to contact us at our Toronto office if you would like to know more about how to change and update your home page.

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